Installation Art at its best – Christo’s “London Mastaba”

“The London Mastaba,” Christo’s first major outdoor work in Britain, is now floating (June 10th -Sept. 23) in the middle of the lake in Hyde Park. A trapezoidal pyramid of 7,506 painted and horizontally stacked barrels, it’s 66 feet tall — as tall as the Sphinx in Egypt — and weighs roughly 650 tons. Named after a flat-roofed structure with sloping sides that originated some 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (the word “mastaba” means “bench” in Arabic), it’s a test for a mastaba roughly eight times as high that Christo hopes to put up in the desert in Abu Dhabi.

[This could be a great classroom discussion on large scale installation Art and the role of Public Art]